Never Believe Your Lying Outline

[inverarity]

I'm reading several books right now, but probably won't finish them until next week or so.

Well, for those of you who don't come for the book reviews, but are hoping for Alexandra Quick tidbits, I have no books to review (though I've got a couple more self-pubbed ebooks to snark about), so this is another of my long rambly self-indulgent author's

Comments

Outlining

[anonymous]

Yeah, I can't outline, at all, for anything. I guess I'm just the kind of person who thinks by writing. The planning I do takes place mostly in my head--I figure, it's much easier to change it if it's just thoughts, whereas if I write it down it becomes more set in stone, and I like flexibility.

I actually think both outlining and not-outlining have their strengths and weaknesses. In particular, the former is probably better for plot-heavy complicated works, whereas the latter likely works well for more character-driven stories. But ultimately, it seems like personal taste to me. To each their own.

And while I'd HIGHLY recommend the A Song of Ice and Fire series, you might want to wait until he finishes the fifth book before starting. I hear the reason the fourth and fifth ones took so long is because he had to scrap a planned timeskip, but the ten years he's taking to write them is really bordering on the absurd.

(do I get an award for butchering verb tense in that last sentence?)

-TealTerror

[fpb]

I think authors tend to become tighter and more conscious plotters as they get older. My favourite example is Dickens, where we go from the virtually plotless Pickwick Papers, through things like Martin Chuzzlewit, where he thinks nothing of suddenly sending his protagonist to America because he had run out of things to make him do and wanted to have some fun at the expense of the Americans, to really disciplined and successful plots like those of Dombey and Son and Bleak House, where you hear the clock ticking dramatically away on every foreboding or secret development to come, and everything that happens at every point until the end is a function of what has been posited at the beginning

Outlining

[anthonyjfuchs]

I tend to be a meticulous outliner, to my own detriment.

Because I not only outline the events of my stories, I arrangement into timelines and calendars, and sometimes into daily schedules. I have a nearly obsessive need to know exactly when everything happens in relation to everything else, and to know exactly where all of my characters are in relation to one another whether I'm writing them at the time or not.

Unfortunately, that can result in me spending more time working on my outline(/timeline/calendar/schedule) than on the writing of the story itself. That's part of what's got The Thief of Souls stalled at the moment. I've created so much story for the story that it can feel nearly overwhelming if I look at too much at once

[indigo_mouse]

I outline. Then I write. Sometimes the two bear a passing resemblance to each other. Usually.... no. If things go well and the characters come to life then they tend to disagree with my outline and insist on going their own way.

At the moment I am stuck trying to write the first chapter of an original fiction. I have an outline (I have several outlines). I know what the book is "about" and who the people in it are. I just can't seem to write the first chapter.

*sigh*